I worked out every day I taught this week.
I know, to those of you who manage full-time office jobs and still work out every day and have great self-discipline, it sounds corny. Though for the record, I tended to find it easier to get in my swim when I did work in an office a block from a pool. Just hit the pool every day on my lunch break! I don’t have that option when I teach, so I must choose some other option. I chose getting up at “Oh my God, it’s early!” and getting it out of the way before I have a chance to make excuses about how I’m “too tired”.
I’m trying to get my mind into a “No Excuses” mentality for working out. This doesn’t mean I’d try to squats on a broken ankle or swim the crawl with a torn rotator cuff. That would be breaking Rule One in new, appalling and exciting ways.
But honestly? I’ve been working out hard for the month before I had my teaching week. The result: I am simply not in agony at the end of the teaching day now. That’s become a big motivator for me. It got me into the pool this morning, boy howdy, let me tell you! While I’m a morning person, I’m a morning person. At 5:30 it’s still night at this time of year, dammit, and I can’t bounce out of bed singing Zip-a-dee-do-dah until the sun starts coming up. I’ve often blown off working out the week I’m teaching. You know, “I’m tired” and “Dammit, I’m doing enough today!” and all sorts of other excuses.
This week has been a real eye opener for me about how the excuses are shooting myself in the foot. Well, more like creating a situation where I feel like a scalpel is scraping the inside of my hip joint, and some uncouth soul is stabbing at my ankles with a pike, but you get my drift. Oh sure, I’m tired at the end of the day. I’m an active, animated teacher. I don’t care how damn fit I get, I’ll be tired at the end of a day.
But “tired” and “shaking from fatigue and limping from pain from being on my feet all day” are two different things. The simple and direct benefit means a lot to me, and it’s really motivating me to keep it up in a way that “you need to exercise to get skinny” never could.
If you have pain issues, ask your doc if he thinks it’d work out for you to try a couple of months of strength building. Might help. No, it doesn’t erase the pain, dammit, but for those of you who live with this crap you know the difference between “contant ache” and “Kill me now!”